Bette Gordon

In the years before Ronald Reagan took office, Manhattan was in ruins. But true art has never come from comfort, and it was precisely those dire circumstances that inspired artists like Jim Jarmusch, Lizzy Borden, and Amos Poe to produce some of their best works. Taking their cues from punk rock and new wave music, these young maverick filmmakers confronted viewers with a stark reality that stood in powerful contrast to the escapist product being churned out by Hollywood.

In NORTH ON EVERS James Benning takes the road movie seriously, making his circular trip across the U.S. a marvelously photographed, intensely felt, and disturbing portrait of contemporary America. In many ways, this recent film is a departure of Benning’s earlier films which are characterized, at times, by extremely long, carefully planned takes and a minimal narrative approach. In NORTH ON EVERS, the shots are kept short with a narrative that is direct and detailed, like a diary or a long series of postcards to a friend. What this work shares with the other films is a dry wit and a deep interest in the American social landscape.

Bette Gordon describes her first feature film as “a narrative derived from film’s own material and my concern for exploring issues of representation and identification in cinema."

65 shots making up a cryptically alluded-to narrative: a lesbian couple's Midwest travels, a hitchhiking young man's journeys, the story of a man who may be having an affair.

A conceptual bicentennial film dealing with spatial and temporal relationships between two travelers, their car, and the geographic, political, and social changes from NY to Los Angeles.